At Trial Over Racial Slur, a Redefining of ‘Acceptable Language’

LONDON — When a soccer player named Anton Ferdinand took the stand in the trial of John Terry, an opposing player who is accused of racially abusing him in a game last year, he seemed embarrassed to tell the court what he himself had said first.

“Please do not worry about the language,” the prosecutor, Duncan Penny, told Mr. Ferdinand. “What did you call Mr. Terry?”

There followed the first of many paint-peeling profanities, as Mr. Ferdinand, 27, and then Mr. Terry, 31, tried to lay out for the bemused spectators at London Magistrates’ Court what constitutes acceptable on-field chat in a typical professional soccer game.

If it was an odd spectacle, hearing such language in a sober British courtroom full of sober British lawyers, so was this an odd case, one seemingly without precedent in British soccer history. Mr. Terry, captain of the Premier League team Chelsea, and captain of the England national team before his arrest, is charged with committing a racially aggravated public order offense — using a racial slur — against Mr. Ferdinand, a defender for Queens Park Rangers, in a game last October.

Racism has been a persistent problem in professional soccer, both in Britain and abroad, and the charges against Mr. Terry were intended to demonstrate how seriously law-enforcement officers take the matter. Antiracism campaigners say the case is an important step in their efforts to draw attention to the problem; supporters of Mr. Terry, including many of his teammates, say he is being unfairly singled out and that he is not a racist.

Before the court came to the racially abusive remark, it had to establish the context for it, an exercise that provided a startling insight into traditional soccer-field discourse. According to accounts the players gave in court and the transcript of an interview Mr. Terry gave to the police, the encounter began when Mr. Terry angered Mr. Ferdinand by failing to return a ball that had gone out of bounds.

Mr. Ferdinand then tauntingly reminded Mr. Terry that he had, to paraphrase, illicitly slept with the girlfriend of Wayne Bridge, another player.

The court heard that Mr. Ferdinand enhanced his remark by making what Mr. Terry told the police was “an obscene gesture of a sexual nature,” whereupon Mr. Terry responded with a different gesture meant to suggest, he explained, that “Anton had bad breath.” (He clarified the point in court, saying that he did not mean it literally and that Mr. Ferdinand’s breath, in fact, “didn’t smell.”)

In between gestures, the two exchanged long and abusive soliloquies, they related, repeating them for the court. As the argument on the field became more heated, Mr. Terry at one point compared Mr. Ferdinand to male genitalia, and then to female genitalia, in consecutive sentences.

Photo

John Terry, center, was charged with using racially abusive language after an off-duty police officer watched a gametime exchange.Credit
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Most of these constituted “handbags,” or “normal verbal exchanges between the players,” Mr. Terry told the police, according to the transcript. These types of things, the players said, include calling other players fat, or taunting them about how their mothers like to have sex with people in other cities. “However unpleasant,” Mr. Terry said, “it’s a fact of the modern game.”

Mr. Terry does not deny that in the course of all this he used a racially offensive remark, inserting the word “black” between a rude adjective and a rude noun that had already seen a great deal of play in the exchange. But, he said, he was merely using the “rhetorical” device of repeating what he (mistakenly, it appears) believed Mr. Ferdinand had accused him of saying in the first place. He added that he often repeated other players’ insults back to them, as a matter of style.

“My words were responsive and not accusatory,” Mr. Terry told the police. “My use of these words was intended to make it plain that I had not called him” — here Mr. Terry repeated the racially offensive term — “and that in reality, Anton was a” — and here he used a term that was sexually but not racially offensive — “for even alleging that I had.”

He continued: “I felt he was accusing me of making a racist remark, which is simply not true.”

Interestingly enough, Mr. Ferdinand says he did not hear Mr. Terry insert the word “black” in his insults, but was only alerted to it after his girlfriend showed him a YouTube video in which Mr. Terry could be seen mouthing the language. The complaint that led to the criminal case was made not by Mr. Ferdinand but by an off-duty police officer who saw the game on television.

On the stand, Mr. Ferdinand said that he “would have been obviously very hurt” had he heard what Mr. Terry said. “When someone calls you a [very bad word], that’s fine,” Mr. Ferdinand said. “When someone brings your color into it, it takes it to another level.”

The trial has proved divisive in the close-knit world of Premier League soccer. While 16 of Mr. Terry’s teammates presented affidavits saying they had “never heard Terry use racist language on the pitch or in training,” a number of others — including Mr. Ferdinand’s brother, who plays for Manchester United but is Mr. Terry’s teammate on the England national team — remained silent.

In a testy exchange, Ashley Cole, a Chelsea player who is black, told the court that he believed Mr. Terry.

“J. T. was saying he thought Anton had said something about ‘black’ and he’s just repeated it,” Mr. Cole said. “That was it. I think we shouldn’t be sitting here. Personally.”

The two sides presented their closing arguments on Thursday; the magistrate in the case is expected to rule on Friday. If he loses, Mr. Terry faces a maximum fine of around $3,000, more symbolic — he reportedly makes around $185,000 a week — than substantive.

In cross-examination, Mr. Penny, the prosecutor, made it clear that he did not believe Mr. Terry’s explanation. “Why not just say, ‘Anton, calm down?’ ” Mr. Penny asked.

A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2012, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: At Trial Over Racial Slur, a Redefining of ‘Acceptable Language’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe